I don’t often link to other blog posts, but this one is excellent. The Facebook Platform sounds a lot like the Google AdWords API that I used to have the misfortune to write software for. A sociopathic API, constantly changing, that didn’t care about the developers that had to use it. How many of those exist also in the open source world.

I think the best thing libvirt did was to offer a stable API and ABI from day 1. Programs written to a published API should rarely (ideally, never) need to be changed.

At the CentOS Dojo in Aldershot, on Friday 12th July. Tickets are £15 per person (don’t worry, that’s not just for me, there are lots of other speakers!), and there’s beer and pig roast in the evening included in the price.

Ask me anything you want about virtualization. I might even be able to answer.

There are also a handful of servers specialized for particular disk sources. A good example of that is this OpenStack Swift server. But you shouldn’t have to write a whole new server just to export a new disk type.

nbdkit hopefully offers a unique contribution to this field because it’s a general server with a plugin architecture, offering a stable ABI and a liberal license so you can link it to proprietary code (say hello, VDDK).

The motivation for this is to make many more data sources available to libguestfs. Especially I want to write plugins for libvirt, VDDK and some OpenStack sources.

You may need to fix /etc/fstab in the guest so that it points to the new partitions. For guests using LABELs or UUIDs, this won’t be necessary.

At this point, it should be simply a matter of running grub-install. But here’s where I remember how much I hate grub, because it just throws up peculiar, non-actionable error messages for every conceivable variation in the command.

So I give up that, and decide to extract the kernel and initrd and use the external boot method after all:

About the author

I am Richard W.M. Jones, a computer programmer. I have strong opinions on how we write software, about Reason and the scientific method. Consequently I am an atheist [To nutcases: Please stop emailing me about this, I'm not interested in your views on it] By day I work for Red Hat on all things to do with virtualization.

My motto is "often wrong". I don't mind being wrong (I'm often wrong), and I don't mind changing my mind.

This blog is not affiliated or endorsed by Red Hat and all views are entirely my own.